Best Palm Beach Post Writer (2004)

Pat Moore

It's an old standard in the news business that any reporter on the same beat for more than a few years is probably a hack. That's far from true for Pat Moore. She's in her 25th year at the Palm Beach Post, covering nothing more significant than the courthouse in the paper's Martin County outpost. Despite job offers in the Post's main office and loads of journalism prizes, including a Scripps Howard Foundation award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment, Moore has insisted upon continuing to cover the same old beat. After all that time, Moore still relishes routinely scooping the cub reporters thrown at her in droves by the Stuart News. Some of her competitors, who typically last no more than a couple of years, include: Janet Weaver, now dean of faculty at the esteemed Poynter Institute for journalists; Tim Roche, Southern bureau chief for Time; and a staffer for New Times. Her competitors have coined nasty nicknames for the matriarch of Treasure Coast reporting (we don't dare reprint them), but sources still routinely go to her first. Now, after all these years, Moore is contemplating retirement. "Well, I'm getting tired," she says in a rare moment of self-deprecation. "I mean, at this point, I can cover a trial almost blindfolded."